Posts
May 17, 2013
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7:42 PM | The Importance of What You Measure
Check out this piece today by Robert Reischauer and Michael McPherson. Reischauer, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, and McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, argued that one of the major problems for education reform is the way we collect data.
It's important to measure outcomes, they write--
If you don’t track your performance, you can’t tell whether you’re improving, and you have no reliable way to know if your improvement strategies are
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One of the major themes in American education reform of the last 20 years is the idea of improving education quality by introducing more competition. Business-style freemarketism will force schools to improve, because, if people have more options they’ll demand better performance.
This is the theory behind primary and secondary reform initiatives like vouchers and charter schools, and also higher education ideas like for-profit colleges and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). As […]
May 16, 2013
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7:32 PM | The Government's Student Loan "Profit"
Is the federal government making a huge profit on student loans? Are students going broke sending hard-earned cash to the Department of Education? That’s the allegation made by many pundits in reaction to Congressional Budget Office report.
As Mandi Woodruff over at Business Insider puts it:
Student loan debt is now one of the Obama Administration's biggest cash cows.
The government is poised to pocket a record $51 billion profit from federal student loan borrowers this year….
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6:56 PM | The Sexual Harassment Police
In an effort to curtail sexual abuse on campus the Obama administration is working on a new policy on harassment. This comes after widespread revelations of colleges (e.g. the University of Montana and Yale) failing to address or report sexual crimes.
The new policy, according to a piece at The Atlantic by Wendy Kaminer (right), looks like this:
In a joint letter to the University of Montana, (intended as "a blueprint" for campus administrators nationwide) the Justice Department (DOJ) and
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3:39 PM | Understanding Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson is a history professor who also gives paid lectures, including a notorious recent event where he made an offhand commend dissing John Maynard Keynes for being gay, marrying a ballerina, and talking about poetry. Ferguson later characterized his own remarks as “stupid.”I blogged a bit about this already, but I just wanted to repeat one point, after reading a couple of comments by some observers who, I think, misunderstood his remarks, taking them more seriously than
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12:35 AM | How to Measure Education Outcomes
A hallmark of leading business management and public policy design today is an increased reliance on measuring results. If you don’t track your performance, you can’t tell if you’re improving, and you have no reliable way to know whether your improvement strategies are having the desired effects. Resistance to measurement can often reflect a reluctance to face up to the need for sometimes unpleasant but vitally important change. Yet measuring outcomes badly or incompletely […]
May 15, 2013
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7:15 PM | Blaming the Coach for Everything
An Oregon bill scheduled for public hearing today would hold coaches at state universities financially responsible for any damages that occur as a result of violations of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules.
According to an article in The Oregonian :
House Bill 3524 provides that coach at public university who intentionally or recklessly commits or causes to be committed major violation of rules of National Collegiate Athletic Association is liable for university's actual damages
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4:13 PM | Instead of Asking for Education Transparency, Maybe We’ll Just Ask for Another Study About It
For years politicians and education pundits have called for more “transparency” in higher education. What programs graduate their students on time? What colleges produce graduates with the highest salaries? How are students paying back their education loans?
Despite years of this stuff, it turns out Congress is still not going to demand that colleges provide this information. Instead, according to Amy Laitinen at the New America Foundation, there’s another call to […]
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I recently re-watched "Star Trek" (2009) with my kids. As many others have noted, one of the more clever plot devices in that film was having it begin with a futuristic Romulan vessel coming back through time to destroy an early Federation ship. This not only provided for a solid story but also created an alternate Trek reality, giving the new franchise a chance to build on old characters and plots without being bound by them.
The Federation ship that was destroyed turned out to be the USS
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May 14, 2013
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7:05 PM | Community Colleges Focus on Jobs
Back in 2010, Jamie Merisotis and Stan Jones wrote for this publication about the potential benefits of using community colleges, and federal money, to help get the unemployed back to work. The administration appeared to have listened and the next year the Department of Labor provided money to community colleges for skills development.
It seems to have worked pretty well. According to a piece at Inside Higher Ed:
The colleges have also used the money to sharpen their focus on career services.
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This is hilarious:
This might be rather personal. I'm pretty sure most of the Daily Show writers have degrees from liberal arts schools.
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From a video conversation between UC Berkeley’s next chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, and Dan Mogulof of Berkeley’s Office of Public Affairs:
I don’t support divestment with respect to Israel. At the same time, many of my colleagues felt very strongly about this and many of them signed a petition, and it circulated widely at the time, which was 2002. There were, after that, all sorts of other controversies that developed about the climate for Jewish students on Columbia’s
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May 13, 2013
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The Supreme Court is set to decide soon on Fischer v University of Texas. The court will likely focus on whether the university has reached a “critical mass” of minority students (enough that minority students no longer feel isolated), the test put forward in the seminal affirmative action case, Grutter v Bollinger. Many observers believe it appears likely the court will ultimately bar public universities from using race in their admissions policies. It will therefore be all the […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education tells us the median salary of public university presidents rose 4.7 percent in 2011-12 to more than $440,000 a year. This increase vastly outpaced the rate of inflation, as well as the earnings of the typical worker in the U.S. economy. Perhaps, most relevant for this community, it also surpassed the compensation growth for university professors. Moreover, the median statistic masks that several presidents earned more than double that amount. Pennsylvania
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May 10, 2013
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Guess who’s making money off your students loans? Turns out it might be your college that's responsible for the loans. That’s because many colleges invest heavily in student loan servicing and collection companies like Sallie Mae.
According to an article in the Huffington Post:
University endowments… are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education….
The
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Columbia has a terrible football team. The school lost 44 football games in a row the 1980s. Columbia's record in the last seven years is 15-45. Its Ivy League record is even worse.
Back in 2011 the school's marching band was even suspended for performing this song at the Cornell game (which Columbia, of course, lost):
We always lose lose lose
by a lot and sometimes by a little
we all were winners at the start,
but four years has taught us all the value of
just giving up, cuz we really
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May 09, 2013
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No matter what state you hail from, he's an employee of one of your state universities.
And he's probably a coach. Except for a few states where academic deans top the list (and Nevada, where the big winner is a plastic surgeon employed by University of Nevada School of Medicine) the jocks are the big winners here.
Here's the map, by Reuben Fischer-Baum at Deadspin:
Fischer-Baum points out that just because these coaches are public employees doesn't mean their massive salaries (Mack […]
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Senator Elizabeth Warren, consumer advocate and erstwhile Harvard Law professor, has introduced her first bill. It would lower the interest rate that students pay on their federal education loans.
According to a piece in the Boston Globe:
Federal loan rates are scheduled under federal law to double on July 1, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. Warren’s bill would let students borrow instead at the rate big banks pay to the federal reserve, which she said is currently about .75 percent,
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3:32 PM | More in Odd College Rankings
Today in outlandish and sort of mathematically questionable college rankings, we’ve got a fun new one.
Not content with one shallow measure of education quality, Buzzfeed has ranked America’s party schools according to the hotness of their students. The winners?
East Carolina University
University of Georgia
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Central Michigan University
University of Colorado, Boulder
New York University
University of California, Santa Barbara
University
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May 08, 2013
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6:34 PM | How Colleges Abuse Pell Grants
A paper out by the New America Foundation today argues that despite Pell grants from the federal government for low-income students, and widespread institutional assurances that they attempt to keep college affordable for the poor, colleges, both public and private, are becoming far too expensive. And that's because colleges seem to be exploiting Pell.
Hundreds of colleges, it turns out “expect the neediest students to pay an amount that is equal to or even more than their families' […]
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It seems that the "Center for College Affordability and Productivity" has issued a ranking of "worst college teaching" using data obtained from...ratemyprofessor.com. Based on a similar analysis of think tank punditry, this is the worst "study" ever from the worst think tank anywhere.
People, I understand the urge to rank colleges. As centers of education or places to work, some universities are better than others, and good rankings can help us make important choices.
And while no ranking […]
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I don’t want this to be a regular feature but I wanted to briefly comment on Ferguson’s open letter regarding the Keynes-was-a-ballet-and-poetry-loving-poof remarks he made the other day at that conference of financial advisors.Ferguson reiterates that his remarks were “stupid.” The question then arises: He’s a smart guy, how did he end up saying such stupid things? Ferguson has a history of saying high-profile stupid things, and they always seem to be when
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May 07, 2013
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Syracuse University has a really strong athletic program, and one that generates significant revenue for the college.
But the university recently found a way to potentially make more revenue from sports. Syracuse decided to leave the Big East Conference for the Atlantic Coast Conference, because the Atlantic Coast Conference has a larger payout to sports teams with conference wins.
So far so good. But Syracuse's contract with the Big East means it has to pay a $7.5 million exit fee. Syracuse […]
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5:38 PM | Outsourcing College Grading
It looks like we can outsource anything. While college students might expect their work to be read by real professors (even if adjuncts or grad students) carefully scrutinizing their work, it turns out careful scrutiny is just getting too expensive.
And so, like so many credit card companies and telemarketers, colleges are sending student work to India. According to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Houston director of business law and ethics studies Lori Whisenant […]
May 06, 2013
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The storm that’s slowly rolling toward Indianapolis quietly gained strength this week with the filing of several devastating documents in a federal court in California. If it stays on course, it’s going to hit with biblical force, reducing the National Collegiate Athletic Association to a heap of rubble. This storm is also known as O’Bannon v. NCAA. It’s an antitrust lawsuit filed in 2009 by former UCLA All-American basketball player Ed O’Bannon and a handful of
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History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports:
Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had
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May 03, 2013
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9:41 PM | The Low Information College Applicant
The competition for students is intense. Colleges need to seem really attractive in order to get new kids to sign up for their particular institution. So they engage in fancy marketing efforts. Glossy mailings. Disney-like campus tours. Targeted Youtube videos.
Yes, we know this looks like a lot of money, they say, but we offer “generous financial aid” (mostly in the form of loans) and it’s really an “investment” in your future (though we’re not going to […]
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7:14 PM | Financial Literacy Doesn’t Work
Colleges often propose a series of “financial literacy” courses to help students manage their debt, pay bills on time, and generally be fiscally solvent adults, despite facing huge payments on college loans.
The University of South Carolina, for example, to address the average South Carolina borrower’s $21,157 of education debt, offers “counseling… a financial literacy program and altering the school’s University 101 course to include a section on financial […]
May 02, 2013
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8:30 PM | The Coming Backlash on Education Reform
For the last decade or so education reform, whether pushed by Democrats or Republicans, has been focused on standardized-test based accountability. We will fix education by testing students and then instituting sanctions when schools fail to improve their scores on standardized tests. Teachers will be evaluated (and fired or given bonuses) based on their ability to improve standardized test scores. Schools will be reformed (or closed) based similarly on test results.
Despite opposition from […]
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7:34 PM | Bully Policy
Perhaps due to the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi back in 2010 (after unwittingly being filmed by another student in his dorm room with another man) the United States is now trying to address bullying in schools.
But could policy fix this problem? Is this a solvable problem?
The American Educational Research Association recently published a comprehensive paper on bullying in America, “Prevention of Bullying in Schools, Colleges, and Universities.”
The report is […]
